Elementary: "A Controlled Descent"Review

Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow. Seriously, don't even scroll down to the picture...

Sherlock's Season 3 may have lost quite a bit of its footing after the character of Kitty Winter exited (following the superb "Illustrious Client" update/adaptation), but the finale, "A Controlled Descent," managed to take us out of the season on a very interesting, harrowing note. One far more interesting than the Holmes/Watson split at the end Season 2. And in someways, a haunting callback to the Season 1 finale, called "Heroine," when Sherlock faked a drug relapse to lure out Natalie Dormer's Moriarty.

Here, the relapse, for all intents and purposes, was real. Making Sherlock's addiction, for the first time even, a very real and debilitating thing. Not that the show hasn't handled the topic well in the past. Hell, it's one of the things that nicely and deftly sets Elementary apart from other Holmes iterations. But this was the first time we got to see Sherlock in such a tragic state.

Addiction is a hard thing to get across on TV, especially for a character like Sherlock who appears so mentally sound, stubborn, and resolute. So it was almost as if we needed to see him collapse and regress, after so many seasons, in order to keep this crisis/crutch/Achilles' Heel viable. As Sherlock resisting heroin had become more or less a blueprint for the series to date.

So to have him go out in a fit of rage -- stomping Oscar (Michael Weston, returning as Sherlock's scumbag former dealer) to (near?) death -- and then succumb to the lure of the drug, after he'd already discovered Alfredo was safe, was a very interesting shake-up.

The episode up until that point though was fairly low-key and underwhelming. In a way that almost gave away the secret that something big was going to go down at the end as a way to counter-balance. It wasn't hard to get ahead of Oscar's true ploy as he was very vocal the last time he appeared about his desire to see Sherlock return to his old ways and slink back down to his level.

So the actual "mystery" element here was non-existant. And while I appreciated the focus on Sherlock's demons, I didn't like that it was all sort of a big half hour wait for the inevitable.

The Verdict

The one-two punch of Sherlock both giving into his anger and his heroin lust was a scorching way to send us out of Season 3. Though it was easy to spot Oscar's agenda ahead of time. Enough to note that Sherlock should've been able to see it coming too.